First Lines Friday – 18/11/2022
Hello all welcome to today’s First Lines Friday post! It’s the end of another working week! If you are counting down the hours until the weekend, then I hope I can distract you with a fun introduction to a book I’m looking forward to picking up. Maybe I can inspire you to pick it up this weekend?
In today’s First Lines Friday post, I decided to repeat my method of choosing today’s featured book as I did last time. To recap, I went to my Goodreads homepage and looked through the books on my feed until a familiar author or title caught my eye. Whereas in my last post, I stumbled across my feature quite quickly, this wasn’t the case this time. A little bit of scrolling later, however, a Goodreads friend of mine published a status update about a book she is re-reading, that is also on my TBR.
Here is today’s teaser introduction!
Perhaps it was a tired thing, all the references the world had already made to the Ptolemaic Royal library of Alexandria. History had proven the library to be endlessly fascinating as a subject, either because the obsession with what it might have contained was bound only by the imagination or because humanity longs for things most ardently as a collective. All men can love a forbidden thing, generally speaking, and in most cases knowledge is precisely that; lost knowledge, even more so.
The Atlas Six – Olivie Blake
Genre: Fantasy
Pages: 383
Audience: Young Adult
Publisher: Tor
Publication Date: 31 Jan 2015
The Alexandrian Society is a secret society of magical academicians, the best in the world. Their members are caretakers of lost knowledge from the greatest civilizations of antiquity. And those who earn a place among their number will secure a life of wealth, power, and prestige beyond their wildest dreams. Each decade, the world’s six most uniquely talented magicians are selected for initiation – and here are the chosen few…
– Libby Rhodes and Nicolás Ferrer de Varona: inseparable enemies, cosmologists who can control matter with their minds.
– Reina Mori: a naturalist who can speak the language of life itself.
– Parisa Kamali: a mind reader whose powers of seduction are unmatched.
– Tristan Caine: the son of a crime kingpin who can see the secrets of the universe.
– Callum Nova: an insanely rich pretty boy who could bring about the end of the world. He need only ask.
When the candidates are recruited by the mysterious Atlas Blakely, they are told they must spend one year together to qualify for initiation. During this time, they will be permitted access to the Society’s archives and judged on their contributions to arcane areas of knowledge. Five, they are told, will be initiated. One will be eliminated. If they can prove themselves to be the best, they will survive. Most of them.
My Thoughts…
Sharing this particular book as part of today’s First Lines Friday post may be quite timely. If you aren’t following this particular book or author, then you might not know that the sequel, The Atlas Paradox, was released at the end of last month.
I only discovered The Atlas Six fairly recently. It is one of the most recent books on my TBR, so it’s unlikely that I will be reading this any time soon! However, that’s not to say I am not excited to give it a go.
What interests me about this particular book is that it was initially self-published by the author. It has done so well that Tor has since signed the author and from there, it has been ‘traditionally published’.
If that doesn’t speak volumes, then I don’t know what will. I discovered this book through a fellow blogger (incidentally, the same Goodreads friend re-reading this at the moment). I believe she first read this whilst the book was self-published, and by all accounts, is enjoying her re-read right now.
I’ve just enjoyed another book with similar dark academia vibes. Throwing in some magic to the mix can only make this better in my opinion!
I hope you’ve enjoyed today’s First Lines Friday post. Have you read The Atlas Six, or the sequel, The Atlas Paradox? I’d love to chat about them if you have!